Updated and more efficient ways of loading games

[MikeFishcake]

You'll probably need extra RAM too.

[Dreamer]

There's an SD card adapter for the Dreamcast which slots in to the DC's serial port.
It's great for all of the homebrew and emulators that are avalible on the DC, but not so efficient with most of the official DC games due the serial port reading way slower than the CD Drive.

OHH it can also hold all of your save data, so if your like me and have a gazilion vmu's full of save data and dlc then it will save you a lot of feckin about trying to find the correct vmu.

[Antiriad2097]

There's an SD card adapter for the Dreamcast which slots in to the DC's serial port.
It's great for all of the homebrew and emulators that are avalible on the DC, but not so efficient with most of the official DC games due the serial port reading way slower than the CD Drive.

I didn't know about the SD card for DC. Not sure it'd be much use though. You say its slow, but not how slow. Having dumped a GD-ROM via my coder's cable, it took about 10 hours for about 800mb iirc! And people said C64 loading was slow.

[the_hawk]

The DivIDE has been around on the speccy for some time & the boffins are always refining it, someone over on WOS is now selling a kempston interface throughport thing & zetr0 is tweaking away at all manor of thecnical gubbins.

The problem I had with the divide was that it was exposed circuitry & I don't have the cognitive capacity to mod something to encase it...



That was until I raided my daughter's lego box ......

[GarryG]

I went a rather more Lo-Tec route that most...

I copied my most used Spectrum games onto a single CD and used an old portable CD Walkman to play them.

The advantages are, I’m not using my original (now sometimes rather shaky) media (eg. Tapes), I have everything I use on one disk, and it is indexed so I can select any particular game without all that tedious forwarding and reversing of tapes – which also leads to ware!

With the addition of one of those tape-adapters that plug into a tape-drive at one end and a normal headphones jack-plug at the other, I also adapted this setup to work with my VIC-20’s proprietary tape-deck.


You don’t need to use a CD player though, a digital storage device with an earphones jack, or straight from the computer works just as well!

[BennyTheGreek]

I have had a bit of success loading spectrum games via ipod and also via mini disc, so I will have to try it via cd as I have a couple of old discmans lying around....

Did manage to load a couple of spectrum games via a turbo loading system (well it speeded up loading manic miner to about 40 seconds) but it was a bit sketchy on others....

tried it with where time stood still and it never worked....

That takes ages to load in...

I think I will get a divide and a small selection of lego as that is one of the best things have seen in a while...

[Dreamer]

I didn't know about the SD card for DC. Not sure it'd be much use though. You say its slow, but not how slow. Having dumped a GD-ROM via my coder's cable, it took about 10 hours for about 800mb iirc! And people said C64 loading was slow.

I think the serial ports transfer speed is around 500 KB/s when using the SD Adapter, compared to 1800 KB/s when reading from a GD-ROM.

Some of the games i tried played well, one being Tokyo Highway Challenge although it's sequel is a no go as it constantly stutters when transfering data from the SD card, similar to the micro stutter that Fallout 3 was plauged with only worse, so most of the SDISO's that are avaliable have had music and in some cases even sound effects removed to help reduce the loading lag.

Things may have improved since i got mine a couple of years ago?. I know theres been a few revisions to the custom OS (Dreamshell) that the SD Adapter uses, though i doubt it will ever come close to to the speed of the DC reading from disc.

Great for Emu's though!

[RetroMartin]

Using it as intended and going to make a cuppa always worked for me!

It won't for ever though, we've already pushed the lifespan of magnetic media written in the 1980s as it is and wear and tear on the tapes, disks and probably the drives will eventually see them give up the ghost. All that most of the solutions being discussed do is emulate the hardware they're standing in for to allow the machines themselves can deal with them, so loading from a floppy drive simulator is a close to identical process to loading from a floppy disk right down to the head seek time in some cases.

If you load an Atari 8-bit game from tape or via a car stereo adapter connected to a CDROM drive or perhaps a CD player it'll still give you time for a fry up before it's finished loading.

Oh I believed we were talking about loading screens and stuff, not different ways of playing, my bad!

[BennyTheGreek]

Well I have ordered a divide from Ebay .....

Just waiting for it to be delivered now....

Playing the games on the original hardware for a change instead of the numerous superb emulators will be a real joy.....



now if I can only find that Mire Mare rom I have somewhere on my pc I will be all set...

[BennyTheGreek]

been on holiday for a week, so finally got round to trying my divide.....

press a button.....choose game - press enter.....BLAM...

simply a superb bit of kit....

Played skool daze this afternoon and am now going back to have a go on contact sam cruise.....

this is going to get some serious usage from me....